Attorney Marketing With SEO - By the Numbers

© 2009, Brandon Cornett.

It's time for another lesson in lawyer marketing, courtesy of the Web Smart Lawyer. Here is today's lesson:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that can improve your website’s ranking in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. In this article, I’m going to explain the various steps of an attorney SEO marketing program, and how you can handle them yourself.

Search engine optimization is not nearly as complicated as most people make it out to be. Attorney SEO firms, for example, will make it seem like a highly complex and technical process — beyond the reach of the average attorney. But this is simply for job security. In truth, SEO marketing revolves around two core concepts. Website content and links. Here’s how those concepts related to search engine optimization success:

• Website content — This refers to the information you have on your website. Within the content of attorney SEO marketing, I’m talking about the text that appears on your site. In order to show up in a search engine for a particular phrase, you need to content related to that phrase on your website. This is the fundamental building blog of SEO success. You must always start with keyword-rich content, and plenty of it.
• Links to your website — This refers to inbound links from other websites to yours. These are also referred to as “backlinks” by those in the SEO marketing field. For instance, if I link to your attorney website from this blog article, you would acquire another inbound link / backlink from this website to yours. In turn, this would help with your attorney SEO program, because search engines rank their results partly based on “link popularity.”

So there you have it, the two key concepts found within any SEO marketing campaign — content and links. That’s not to complicated is it? Of course not! I told you it was straightforward. Oh, you can be sure that the attorney search engine optimization firms will make it seem more complicated. They’ll talk about the hundreds of steps they go through to get good results. They’ll show you diagrams and “blueprints” for success. But it’s just not that complex. Attorney SEO marketing can be time-consuming, sure. But it ain’t rocket science, folks.

Content = Building Block of Attorney SEO Success

Let’s start with the content side of things. As I mentioned above, you cannot begin to appear in the search engines for a particular phrase until you develop keyword-rich website content around that phrase. I’m talking about the words, sentences, paragraphs and pages that make up your website. A search engine “spider” will read through this information in order to understand what your site is all about.

Here’s how the process works, and how it relates to attorney SEO marketing success:

Let’s say I practice family law in Austin, Texas. Naturally, I want a website that will attract people who need this kind of attorney (i.e., qualified traffic). So the first thing I need to do, from an SEO standpoint, is write some keyword-rich content for my site. Here’s how I would do it:

1. Use a keyword research tool like WordTracker.com or KeywordDiscovery.com to create a list of popular search phrases (related to my practice).
2. Write a page of website content for each of the phrases on my list.
3. Ensure that each page is well optimized for search engine visibility. I would do this by repeating the keywords and phrases naturally throughout the content, and by including them in the page title as well.

That’s the gist of it. Pretty simple, right? By the very nature of their profession, most attorneys are excellent writers. So this part of the SEO process will probably be the easiest for you.

Links = Secret Weapon of SEO Marketing

Do a Google search for a broad, high-traffic search phrase like “San Diego law firm” and you’ll find thousands of results. So how does Google (or any other search engine) know which ones to put on page one, and which ones to “bury” on page 100? Well, each search engine does this in different ways, because each one has its own ranking “algorithm.” But a lot of it comes down to the two things we are covering in this SEO article — content and links.

But keyword-rich website content can only take you so far. After all, if hundreds of websites have similar amounts of content built around a particular phrase or topic, they would appear equal. Right? Wrong. This is where links come into the picture. In most cases, the websites with the most inbound links from other sites will appear near the top of the search results. This is referred to as “link popularity” — the quantity and quality of inbound links.

Writing content is easy. I wrote this article in about 30 minutes. But attracting links is another matter entirely. I can’t just go out and snatch up links from other sites. I have to earn them. And that’s the number-one concept you should take away from this part of the article. You have to work hard to attract links from other bloggers, webmasters and Internet publishers. And the best way to do this is by creating quality content that others will want to cite.

Let me repeat that last point, because it’s a critical concept you need to absorb. The key to link building (and thus the key to attorney SEO marketing in general) is to create useful content that others will want to link to and recommend to their readers. If I do a good job creating tutorials like this one, I’ll eventually attract links from other web publishers. Ideally, they will find my content so informative and useful that they hyperlink to it from their own websites, as a way of sharing it with their readers. I strive to make my website a useful and authoritative resource for this very reason, and you should do the same … if you want to achieve SEO success on your attorney website.

You should strive to create the kind of site that attracts links naturally, sort of like a snowball effect. I’ve just explained how to work toward that goal. But in the beginning of your SEO marketing campaign, you’ll need to be a bit more proactive with your link-building efforts.

Here are two places where you can learn those proactive techniques:

• From the Web Smart Lawyer e-book
• From this tutorial on improving your Google rankings

I hope you have enjoyed this guide to attorney SEO campaigns. If you would like to learn more about this subject, check out the search engine optimization section of our main website. There, you’ll find a list of articles on this topic.